Why do all these 20-somethings have closed captions turned on?
wsj.com
wsj.com
Whenever I watch movies with my wife, we constantly have to fiddle with the remote control. The loud parts (including explosions and music) are too loud for her, so we have to turn the volume down during those parts, but the dialog is too quiet and mumbly for me to hear, so we turn the volume up during those parts. We now just keep the volume low and turn on subtitles--easy but shitty solution.
Sound engineers need to stop needlessly flexing all that dynamic range that modern tools give them, and just produce a watchable movie. Actors need to go do some stage acting and learn how to e n u n c i a t e and project their voices.
But anyway, I just wanted to jump in and say... all the time on this site we see programmers complaining about management/etc forcing things to happen that you don't want happening. Sound engineers may be in a similar boat here. ;P
When my family was going through all the Marvel movies at first I tried to control the volume by making it higher during the dialog and lower during the battles etc but it was an exercise in futility, as I'm only human and there would be some delay in volume change and we would still miss what the guy/gal said or my house would start noticeably shaking from the unexpected explosion happening during a scene where a guy was intensely whispering his rescue plan to his compatriots or whatever. Plus it started feeling like I'm working instead of enjoying the movie. So lower volume and subtitles it is.
I have home theater with 5.2 and 5 speakers, all it does is that when stuff in the movie goes boom my house starts to shake.
Things became worse in the past 10 or something years (I am a 40 something btw.). As the article states we used subtitles in movies to learn language and to understand thick accent. However throughout time while we got better and better in comprehension the use of subtitles remained the same in overall. But very uneven too.
Old movies (not yet seen) and movies for children are never a problem. Also some properly made movies. The atmosphere and sound effects are fine as well as the dialogs.
But it became too much of a trend to make muttery a mushy dialogs where people seemingly unable to articulate. To the level never heard in real life (where muttering may be more common due to the more causal and mood or situation affected nature of conversations, unlike the carefully created and heavily controlled ones in movies). Also it is uneven. Some movies are still fine, but others (perhaps the newest Batman comes to mind, unsure, forgot that movie mostly, being so obscure) are a struggle, not fun at all. Aggrevated by the loud bangs and muttery dialog combo.
A sign that this is a systematic and intentionally manufactured problem, that sound engineers and directors lost their touch completely, is the existence of a feature in the newest Apple TV for equalizing the sound level in a movie. Streaming hardware manufacturers had to come up with solution to correct what sound engineers ruined or unable to get right nowadays.
Older movies are almost never a problem. New movies are in an uncomfortable amount.
The sound mixes today are so far off a pleasant experience that the people who do make them should feel ashamed - How do many actually have a home cinema room with soundproofing and 20 speakers ?
Most people watch movies with a headset / a TV / 2.1 / 5.1 surround system and they may even be limited by other factors like neighbours and you know real life..
And the the voice levels is obnoxiously low and way (negatively) beyond what i would call a good experience.
Maybe it's a lost art. I have found that turning off subtitles and forcing myself to get used to their accents does improve my listening comprehension, but it's a much easier choice when you can't otherwise understand it just due to mixing.
I don't know that it helps me focus, if anything I have to focus harder when they're talking so I can hope that their lips will be enough to figure it out. But it does mean that if I'm watching something in a place with roomates I can use a much lower volume and figure out what is going on by combining the text with the low SNR audio I hear.
Listening at a low volume should mean better overall hearing over time too right? My default volume went from like -20dB to -45dB on the same system over the last decade, I think either I'm being polite to roomates or just more careful with my hearing.
Can't really help with the actors thing, though I think I'd rather characters that are truer to life than sound like they're acting on stage, personally.
[1]: https://ffmpeg.org/ffmpeg-filters.html#acompressor [2]: https://github.com/ruuda/dotfiles/blob/fff8d1d905767e85b57d7...
ffmpeg-normalize -v --progress -c:a aac -b:a 768k -ar 48000 -t -14 *mkv
The overall trend in TV and movies has been towards greater realism in all aspects. Less stage-audience sitcoms, more single-cam. Less "look at this actor" and more "look at this real person".
Actors aren't mumbling, they're speaking how real people speak. Trust me, screen actors have more stage training than ever -- they know how to enunciate but if they do, the director tells them to stop because they seem like they're giving a fake theatrical performance rather than being a slice of real life.
And because more and more people have huge TV's with great contrast, 5.1 surround systems, or are watching with AirPods with spatial audio... TV is becoming more film-like both in range of brightness and loudness. For many people (like myself) this is a godsend. It's like I'm at the cinema every time I watch an hour-long drama. It's amazing.
We could go back to low-contrast everything and overly enunciated actors, the way sitcom TV was, designed for small screens and terrible speakers. But that just feels so... backwards and limited and fake.
HOWEVER, I do firmly believe that modern TV content should be made more accessible, and that it's high time to build adjustable "end-user compression" into all TV's and video players. Let the user apply automatic volume equalization so quiet parts are just as loud as the loud parts when you're watching TV in your living room with lots of activity around. (And with 5.1 signals, you can even always keep dialog louder than sound effects and music.) And brightness equalization so you can see what's happening in the dark scenes of Game of Thrones when you're in a sunlit room.
Watch some German shows (notably: Not Netflix’s Dark as that was untypical, I mean actually produced for the German market shows). It’s horrible. Everything sounds super fake. Yes, everything is easy to understand, but I (a German) can’t watch anything because nothing sounds real.
It’s usually claimed this is because German actors do more stage acting, but as Dark (or other German actors in US productions where they don’t sound fake) show, it goes much deeper.
And not just sound engineers! So many TV shows these days are filmed in nearly pitch black. If there are any lights on in the room (or it's still bright on a northern summer night and the living room doesn't have blackout curtains), I can't see the action. At first I thought I was just being cranky and old, but then we watched The Neverending Story with my kid and lo and behold, they film in "dark scenes" with torches etc so you can still see the actors well enough to read their lips! I'm sure it would be fine if I was watching it in a proper theater, but it's a frikkin TV show and who even goes to the cinema anymore?
I like the tv on quietly relative to other people I know, and continually messing with the volume is tedious.
On YouTube the ads are the explosions. Ads are so loud compared to the regular videos that I often just turn the volume down and the captions on.
What may be happening is that your speakers have a scooped profile, and audio mixes often have a scooped profile too. The sound effects and music tend to be bass and treble heavy, so you hear a lot of that.
But the lack of midrange means voices are hard to understand. You need range that to distinguish vowels, etc
I don’t understand how anyone can watch a movie with iPad or iPhone speakers. They are missing the exact part of the spectrum where important info in voices live. It’s just painful for me to pay attention with those speakers.
My parents were doing this, and I got them a simple Bluetooth speaker with midrange, and they immediately noticed the difference. Their faces lit up.
Judging by the comments here, it does seem there is a "double" race to the bottom of more treble and bass -- on the audio mix side and on the speaker side. So it's a compounding effect, which would explain a lot. So the least you can do is get some better speakers.
Or honestly if you have an EQ, you can just experiment with turning up the midrange and the treble/bass down, although with some speakers this will make things sound bad.
----
Also I just skimmed the original article!! Isn't it obvious that the problem is iPad and iPhone speakers ????
I see young people listening to MUSIC on these things and it boggles my mind
They can't understand dialogue out of these crappy tinny speakers, so they turned on closed captioning ?? Makes total sense.
Or are they also using them with ear buds, which shouldn't have the problem? I notice more people NOT using ear buds (annoying people on the train), which makes me think the problem is the speakers
Add all that to the usual nodding actors - they don't understand what they're supposed to be feeling so they just nod as they talk. Sorry to call that out, now you will never be able to un-see it again.
And whispering as a substitute for emotion! What the hell? Character is supposed to be feeling intense emotion, so the actor whispers. The director should slap them every time, and re-shoot.
Most of this is a result of surround sound and people not setting it up. There are two main speakers, a center speaker, and various surround speakers depending on the setup.
Dialog is primarily mixed to come out of the center speaker. If you turn the center volume up and the main speakers down you can fix the problem where explosions/music are too loud but dialog is too quiet.
Audio component manufacturers have actually responded to this tendency by adding in-line compressors to the audio channels that can be enabled/disabled. Sometimes this is labelled as the "Dynamic Range" feature in AV systems. Essentially it squashes the loudest sounds, which in turn brings up the average volume of the quietest sounds, thus evening the overall volume and allowing for a single volume setting to be used throughout the movie.
I avoid stuff without captions. Sorry, your shite is almost certainly mixed horribly.
Your receiver will have a dynamic compression feature of some sort. Make sure that's maxed and it'll help. But frankly, an action movie isn't supposed to have explosions at the same sound level as dialog.
Yep, I've been doing this now for several years. I guess i got used to watching (and enjoying!) many films that are not in English, but 99.9% of the time its because of actors mumbling, or some background noise (in the film) not making it easy to discern what was stated.
I am all for a ruthless dialog loudness war, like the loudness war in the 1990s-2010s.
Exact same problem at home... it was so bad on Interstellar that after that movie, she never went to a cinema with me again, or watched any movies together at all :(.
Turns out I’m also half deaf in one ear.
Anyway I’d recommend both a centre channel with adjustable volume and a hearing test.
Guy could barely speak english, but listen to the background audio when he screams that. Great example
Hard disagree. I want realism. The sophistication of modern audiences is now so high that the level of enunciation and clarity in older movies now sounds comical to modern audiences. Believe it or not this old style speak you see in Older movies was Literally artificial and made for acting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gpv_IkO_ZBU
Modern Audiences want realism. They want a certain level of believably that matches with reality. And a dialect artificially designed for "clarity" on radio just doesn't work.
Clarity takes a hit in the name of realism... but who cares? I have closed captions for that. Literally I don't see what's wrong with it.
To me it seems closed-caption usage is correlated with actually paying attention to television consumption.
People who have their TV on at all hours, as background entertainment to support their lifestyle, tend to not use CC. Why should they? The words literally don't matter, it's just an aesthetic.
People who actually desire an immersive experience, who deliberately pay attention to the shows they watch, tend to care about CC since it complements the audio & visual nicely. I don't have any evidence for this but I'd wager that plot synthesis and comprehension of television shows is greatly improved by CC. Or maybe it's that people who use CC tend to value and perform better at synthesis and comprehension? Regardless of causality, CC seems related to an individual's desire for more active entertainment.
Bonus if it’s delayed by exactly 2 seconds, so that it doesn’t spoil jokes, and I can quickly reference it if I missed something someone said (helping me avoid fixating on the captions.)
Because it’s the CC descriptions of music swells and things like “[laughs] and “[crying]”, etc that are distracting for me, and not needed.
What’s worse, sometimes they ruin comedic timing by putting the punchline on the screen before the setup has finished (or logical equivalent of a punchline… comedy is often found in timing) and the captions ruin the timing.
As you say, you don't have any evidence for this, so I'll just add that my subjective impression is the absolute opposite. I find it impossible to concentrate on what is happening visually on screen in a film when closed captions are on.
I associate CC with the one place I ever see them - at the laundromat, where they are always on because you can't hear the TV clearly above the background noise. Hard to think of a setting where "background entertainment" is a better descriptor.
[0] https://mediawiki.middlebury.edu/MIDDMedia/Hot_versus_cool_m...
Ditto with excessive darkness.
You may notice that in movie theaters—the most focused and immersive watching experience there is—they don’t show captions except maybe when translating foreign language.
Or you may not, if you only watch movies at home on your TV.
If I'm actually fully immersed in the movie or whatever, and I can understand the dialogue, then I don't need the captions and I leave them off.
In the past, that line needed to come in loud and clear, or people would just miss it, probably forever. Now, we can rewind, or of course turn on subtitles, so there's not as much pressure on the audio finishing to be super clear.
I'm a background watcher for sure, and this trend with CC suggests to me that the whole "2nd screen" thing isn't playing with the younger generation.
Any insights as to why that may be?
To give more context, I was always a "background media" person. Even as a kid I'd draw while in front of the TV, I was never a focused participant.
By contrast I always pay attention when CC is off.
Given how much younger people use their my phone, I’m gonna say my hypothesis is plausible.
Older people are more likely to be alone and the TV helps to break the silence. TV is usually tv shows where people speak properly so that helps i guess
The alternative is that the new generation has no ability to focus on anything and needs the same information piped to their brain through both their eyes and ears. Up next: smellovision captions.
For me I find I miss things without the subs on. Whispered/background dialog that I'm unsure how anyone is supposed to hear/understand being top of list but also sound mixing seems to be terrible by default and it's hard to hear/understand characters even in a quiet room sometimes. I read quickly so subs have never been an issue to me, I can scan and parse the subs and be looking back at the video in no time at all.
For foreign content (like Anime) I use dubs + subs (the subs are of the initial English translation before the dubs were done) because it gives 2 passes at any given line. I find it very interesting to see how they change things between the two and it sometimes paints a fuller picture.
So many video sources coming with only surround mixes, or lazy stereo mixes that were made automatically from surround mixes, while very few homes have a surround system at all, and even fewer have one that's at least decently-calibrated, has been absolute hell for being able to tell WTF anyone's saying in movies. I suspect many VHS releases had better audio for most people's actual system even today, than the blu-ray of the same movie does.
I cannot stand having subtitles in the same language as the dialogue, but which differs in phrasing/content. It is very distracting to me.
Anime is an interesting case, because — remember, a lot of these threads are about poor enunciation and mixing? — anime tends to be really well enunciated, and the characters speak like they're on stage. It's easy to follow along. I keep subs on, because I don't understand literally everything, but usually I don't read them.
Surprise surprise, this doesn't reduce my immersion at all.
2) With closed captions you can watch a movie on low volume without disturbing others and still understand every word even of the girl in the corner of the room barely utters a word.
Source: I'm a "20-something".
I can't believe that whole dramatic article missed this very obvious reason.
I have a hard time believing this. Captions demand more attention if anything. I can passively "watch" a video by only listening to the audio, but I can't passively read.
I think that the phenomenon described in the article may actually be a symptom of a much deeper social change. Listening and auditory comprehension were critical skills for communication and preservation of knowledge in prehistory. Spoken word is inherently ephemeral. As civilizations developed or adopted writing systems, and the population became increasingly literate, text supplanted spoken communication and oral history in many areas. There are many obvious benefits to that change, but I believe that we also inadvertently sacrificed our listening and auditory comprehension skills in the process over many generations.
Text messaging/SMS is increasingly preferred to phone calls, with many of the younger generations experiencing high levels of anxiety if they're required to call someone.
This is completely anecdotal, but I've also observed several others who are unable to follow verbal navigation instructions - either spoken from another person or even live step by step instructions from a navigation app. They only feel confident if there's a visual representation.
I think we've mistakenly classified that behavior as having a "visual learning style", when it is more accurately the result of our species losing its ability to process auditory language.
With audio, if you missed a word, because you were focussing on something else for a moment, you have to rewind. If you have captions on, you can glance quickly at the screen, read the word or two that you missed, allowing you to 'recover'.
That allows you to pay even less active attention to the audio, because you know you can always 'error-correct' later.
I do this. I can parse what is happening on screen and read the captions in a fraction of the time the thing actually plays out, then I got a few seconds to do something else. Usually I would be reading HN or something while I tune out the video for a few seconds, before glancing at it again to catch the next bit.
Listening to a video and reading something else at the same time doesn't work for me. When I do that, I usually forget what I was reading or miss something in the video. Interleaving works much better for me.
Also I don't normally do that, just when there's some particularly boring part that I don't want to skip but which doesn't demand my undivided attention.
Where are older generations would have spend far more time communicating verbally..
That makes some sense to me anyway. Would be super interesting to see some further studies done. And to philosophise the results that could mean.
If the dialogue is 60dB below the explosions (or even the music at times) and you're doing something like cooking with a 70dB noise floor and 80dB peaks, then you have zero chance of getting the dialogue without blowing out your windows.
If the dialogue is 60dB below the explosions and you're doing something like cooking with a 70dB noise floor and 80dB peaks, then you have zero chance of getting the dialogue without blowing out your windows.
With social media videos, CC is even more important cause nobody wants their phone making noise in public, and any wise app will mute by default anyway.
Then again, maybe you're right, I don't process auditory language and when I was in university, I skipped classes to instead read the textbook back to back without a teacher distracting me by yammering around.
It's because re-reading a word I didn't understand is much faster and easier than re-hearing (in my head) a word I didn't understand.
It's even happened with my spouse, in the same room, speaking the same dialect of American English as me, with the same accent. I mis-hear one word, and it bleeds into the next word, and I need to think for a few seconds or ask them to repeat before the sentence makes any sense to me.
Perhaps us, and the TV actors, just don't enunciate like we used to?
It's SO interesting.
They are generally really well put together. And they often highlight things that I would have missed - mentioning the name of a character who joins a scene who I don't instantly recognize, for example.
Even more fun: audio descriptions of the title sequences for a TV show. Three that I particularly enjoyed were Severance, Moon Night and Star Trek: Picard - in all three cases the titles are rich with visual metaphors relating to the show, which the audio description then carefully spells out for you!
But as a 'go to', that's like reading the comments before the article.
Edit: Not exactly the same : I was referring to "Directors commentary" audio tracks.
Edit 2: I'm a bit worried you need the environment and expressions explained to you...
Thirty years ago, if you missed a line of dialog, it wasn't usually a big deal.
Now if you're watching Westworld? If you misunderstand a single line that might be the entire difference between "solving" the episode or not.
TV has gone from a "casual" experience you can tune in and out of, to a kind of literary-precision experience that demands your undivided attention, for many shows. CC makes sure you understand every word, which just wasn't usually that important previously.
I’ve had a few instances where I didn’t “get” what had happened; I thought maybe it was just over my head. Turns out, I just missed some key dialogue is all.
For example, compare a show like Lost against Westworld. With Lost each scene was so drawn out, that even if you missed a line, you'd be able to figure out what's going on from the general context.
It made a radical difference. We now tend to just have them on all the time. It's really mostly more modern movies and TV that we get value from it on, the audio mix is becoming such a mess with dialogue sinking in to the mix, that it's taking so much more effort to watch & listen. Put something on from 20ish years ago and the mix is totally different. That's despite having a sound system with a multiple speakers.
During the gaps in speech, a narrator comes on and describes the most important things happening on the screen.
I had a gig for awhile actually writing the descriptions for this content, and it's really interesting work!
I love that we're discovering that features invented for "accessibility" are appreciated by many people who would not otherwise have identified an accessibility need. I can't help but wonder if it means people who were only dealing with mild impairments are now receiving assistance they didn't know they would benefit from. How many people do you think can pass a hearing test in a silent room lab setting, but have a hard time in our noisy world?
Come to find out, for whatever reason, it had audio description turned on by default.
As someone who can see and hear fine, I found it rather odd(before learning what it was). But for a vision impaired person, such a thing must be a game changer.
These are called curb cuts, which were intended to help people who use wheelchairs, but we’re quickly appreciated by moms with strollers.
Wound up turning it off when I could see clearly, though. It felt strange to hear about what was happening in a scene just as I watched it happen.
Definitely could see it being useful while multitasking, though. I want to try that out at some point.
In any case I think my anime watching has resulted in a slight dislike for CC if only because I find it all too easy to accidentally only read, and actually the action going on. I only realized this when I go back and rewatched some old youtube clips and found myself not remembering the actual animation and physical comedy.
You have to get used to it but it only takes a few tries.
I wonder if delaying joke/punchline subtitles till after the spoken line is complete would improve this
I’ve also always had CC on for my kid and they’re an excellent reader. I don’t have any concrete evidence for it but part of me thinks their strong reading skills are partly due to that.
Through my years of watching Anime it's also quite easy for me to watch and read at the same time.
I think for watching movies they can be useful too, because it feels like almost every movie coming out now has terrible audio mixing for the average person. Even the audio mixing in a Dolby Atmos theatre doesn't seem right. If you watch any modern film mastered in Dobly Atmos on a TV with a sound bar you will have a bad time. You'll have a worse time if you're watching with just the TV speakers.
If I want to really focus on the movie I usually turn the subtitles off because sometimes the subtitles are ahead of the scene a bit and then it spoils some key moments slightly. HOWEVER, when I fail to understand a word and the subtitles are off I rewind, turn them back on, and just leave them that way. If audio mixing was consistent and good I would leave them off.
I similarly struggle to understand what actors are saying when they’re backed by theme music or other physical things going on as part of (or behind) the story. Captions help me actually consume video rather than feel lost in it. Without text I pretty much would stop consuming video entirely.
Granted, I’m 40 so I can’t speak for the youngs. And I hear just fine in that the sounds are all present in my ears and my brain. They just get jumbled and being able to catch up with text helps immensely.
My hearing is good, but the delays in processing dialog to content make watching movies or tv very frustrating when I can't see the actor's face to lip read or don't have CC to catch what I miss.
On the other side of things, I have a very high level of internal voice so when I am reading text I can 'hear' the dialog in my head. I can listen to the first 20 minutes of a movie or episode or two of a tv show, then watch it muted with subtitles and will hear the actor's voices. It's nice because I can watch shows with my own background music or without disturbing anyone with the audio.
I used to hate subtitles -- found them super distracting. Then I met my wife, whose family always watched with them on. In part because English is their second language, and as I learned later, in part because some of the relatives are very loud and talk over everything.
Now I can't watch without them. Maybe between getting used to them and having kids and the crappy mixes with the dialogue too quiet, I need them now. I feel like I'm missing something without them.
A lot of dialog is mixed way down in relation to the music and background noise, actors tend to speed up and drop the volume at the ends of their sentences, and of course there are those pesky accents.
I'm seeing a lot of other good reasons in this thread, too.
On the other hand, the downside is that when you interact with people in realtime, you constantly feel like they're speaking too slowly, and others have trouble understanding what feels like a normal speed of talking for you.
I just find I enjoy taking the information in more when I can do it quickly. If my brain has no trouble operating at that speed, I might as well take advantage of the chance to get more new ideas in my head!
Also, if I'm watching British shows, I like CCs because I'm really bad at accents.
Edit: I'm coming up on 40 now, so I guess I'm not the people this article is complaining about.
- when I play game, I don't need to restart or rewind if I missed a sentence.
- when I watch movie, similarly, I can capture way more context without having to ask "what did the character say?"
- when I click on a short clip, I can understand without having to turn on and off audio.
It's all about convenience and saving time for me.
1. The sound mix has a huge dynamic range now, and lots of action scenes are mixed in with quiet conversation. Set the volume down, and you miss the dialogue. Set the volume up, and you wake up the neighbors.
2. Dialects and accents seem to be more prevalent in content, and CC helps to cut down the cognitive load of “translation” while being entertained. Frankly, I enjoy the diversity of content, but I don’t want to have to work hard to watch TV.
I've found this really frustrating. I constantly have to control the volume when watching a movie. Commercials are also obnoxiously loud. It made me wonder whether the TV could automatically "balance" upcoming sounds so that quiet scenes are never quiet and loud ones are not too loud.
I've also noticed a prevalence of mixing background noise/music into dialogue scenes which often overpowers the main dialogue, or overlaps in audio range enough to make it hard to hear. Add in sub-par audio equipment, or equipment which is compelled to emphasize one end of the audio over the other - and you have a recipe for difficult to understand dialogue.
Turning on the closed captions is an easier solution than fussing with the audio in many cases.
I was once told, by a salesperson in a TV store that this was essentially "by design" and that the solution they're taught to present is to "buy a soundbar". From his understanding, in the quest to get thinner TV manufacturers sacrificed built-in speaker size and quality, which results in the effect you describe. I am not sure how much is sales patter and how much is truth...but I bought a sound bar!
This is why they are always on in our house. I think people who understand fine take for granted how hard accents can be.
My wife is ESL. She understands me fine, and the 'neutral tv accent.' She can't understand a word my father says(Appalachian accent). Can't understand British people, Boston accents, etc. She's learning, slowly, but I've never even thought about how amazing it is we're able to process all the different ways people speak, rather seamlessly.
Apparently most who have it don't have the classic symptoms: tinnitus or hearing loss picked up at the audiologist's office.
I don’t know if it’s technically hearing loss though; I feel like I can hear the noises my friends are making, I just can’t segregate them from the background noise enough to parse the former as speech.
Back then you couldn't rewind if you didn't understand and important piece of dialogue, and being able to read while you watch absolutely helped with not missing those moments. My parents didn't like my shows too loud, so captions just made them better.
I got in the habit of turning on CC all the time, except live shows which were usually not worth the effort.
30 years later I still love captions. When my children are sleeping in the next room, I can keep the volume low.
The only downside is that sometimes captions ruin the jokes.
I think partly it’s because English is not my native language so caption in the early days helped. I also grew up with radio (no electricity / TV) - so I mostly listened and made up my own pictures. That said, I don’t completely tune out the voice now - it’s useful for tone and inflections but I depend on captions to get the the compete picture.
^ also applies to bad dubbing + original audio not available
^^ seems to be an increasingly rare skill these days
Words per minute read - 220-350
When doing some other task side by side with consuming a movie with captions, the combination of reading and hearing allow a better comprehension than just one or the other. E.g. side tasks like reading twitter, playing a game, sending a text message. When captions replace the aural mode, this allows enough time to interleave attention (e.g. watching a movie while browsing TikTok on mute).
I'm sorry I don't have the link but there actually was an online lament by professional sound crews for film/TV that I read a few months back. Sound is apparently compromised by the usual suspects: creative egos, competing priorities, actors' failure to enunciate clearly, and failure to appreciate the technical nature of audio recording. In some cases, the director instructs the sound crew to "capture" the performance after the scene is shot. I've never worked on a set before so I'll leave it at that and say that as an older person, I love CC and use it all the time whether I'm other-tasking or not!
> In a May survey of about 1,200 Americans, 70% of adult Gen Z respondents (ages 18 to 25) and 53% of millennial respondents (up to age 41) said they watch content with text most of the time. That’s compared with slightly more than a third of older respondents, according to the report commissioned by language-teaching app Preply.
Not sure if you want to trust Preply over your clickbait spidey sense. I’ve never heard of them. But FYI.
If I’m reading, I’m both able to understand faster and reread if I need to.
Once I got used to having them on for stuff I needed them for, I tend to leave them on unless I'm watching carefully and it bugs me that they block part of the screen.
I know this happens on BD, but I wouldn't be surprised if Netflix + co are using the same source, and 20-somethings probably don't have large places with surround sound systems.
There are 2 schools of thought. 1 - People on average behave differently now because of something to do with the people (their age usually, sometimes their wokeness, or there race, or there politics) and 2 - People on average behave differently now because of something to do with the environment (having internet now, different economics now, ratio of cost of living to income now, etc).
I tend to fall into more #2. It's not that "kids these days" do this. It's that movies and TV these days does this. If a younger person is watching an Seinfeld episode from 30 years ago there is no need for subtitles, if an older person like me is watching a TV show or movie that came out this week It's likely that subtitles would help anyone, of any age, follow the story.
As other comments here have noted. It has to do with the huge dynamic range on audio in most new film/TV. In my view it's not a "kids these days" thing, it's a "content these days" thing. I think that most things are this way. We read about how younger generations aren't as into home buying, nope. Economics have changed, they're not as able.
But I can't go back. I've re-watched movies with subtitles and found explanations of things (non-plot critical, but contributory or interesting) that were previously drowned out by mumbling or poor mixing or just not having the volume high enough to vibrate the foundations.
Subtitles explain all!
(I actually find it's harder to multitask if I'm watching a show, because I need to read the screen - this isn't necessarily a bad thing if it's a show I've actually chosen to try to watch).
P.S. 2nd episode of the latest season of Rick and Morty has an ... interesting ... differentiation between the subtitles and spoken words for one specific word starting with c, in which the subtitle was the original, category* 0, word, whilst the obviously replaced word also started with c but is a somewhat more acceptable category* 2 word.
*categories made up by me on the spot.
Like seriously, this kind of needless naval gazing from a supposedly serious outlet just frustrates me so much.
Could be a combination of:
- Degraded hearing
- Degraded audio comprehension, relying on the text
- Realising how much I was missing, just due to bad audio mixing or low quality TV speakers
- Getting over the ‘annoyance’ of having text pop up on screen & being able to view both the subject & text at once.
I watched Top Gun (new) with my dad, he has a sound-bar setup and a HUGE TV. I honestly couldn’t understand 50% of the dialogue, and when I asked him to enable the subtitles he refused and said I should get my hearing checked. So I started asking him “what did they say?”, and to his surprise, half the time he couldn’t actually tell me what the actors were saying. It’s a mix of issues. I think that movie had horrible audio mastering and maybe a lot of media does these days too.
If I play a 1990s movie on my crt with the built in speaker (yes, in 2022) it's fine.
Try to play something on Netflix and the sound effects and music are full blast while the mumbled voices are really quiet.
In the 80s and 90s this was an occasionally used process to fix problematic scenes, now it’s used for 70-100% of a full, particularly high budget.
The actors sit in an anechoic sound recording room and whisper their lines a few cm from a microphone
They’ll do this even if the camera POV is meters away from the character in a busy environment, where the any human would be talking loudly straining to be heard over the background noise.
ADR makes all dialog recording sound like soft pillow talk.
Add incessant overproduced over compressed music score to the mix, a 5.1 to stereo downmix, and you have an incomprehensible movie.
But then I read all the accounts of people who can't explain why they turn on subtitles, aside from "I just like it" or "I'm just used to it", and I just... I feel confused, angry. I AM the out of touch old person.
But when it came time for me to try Spanish overdub with Spanish captions, it turned out that the scripts had obviously been translated by two different companies, and what was said could be wildly different from what was written. Hysterically bad differences - to the point of completely changing the sentiment of something that was said. Mostly it was with insults or expressions, which could have various ways of translating, but sometimes they changed entire plot points, especially when a character's relationship with another was ambiguous. An aunt could be just a friend, or a sister-in-law could be a co-worker. It was so confusing, after a little while I just turned off the captions completely. Since I had seen all the shows at least once, it wasn't a problem.
A fun thing to do on Disney Plus is change between the various Spanish regions to see how they overdub characters. I did this for Guardians of the Galaxy and it's fantastic how Rocket would go from being a Mexicano gangster to a Spanish thug.
The premise of surround sound is that it is extremely important to know the direction that the sound is coming from -- but when you sacrifice the audience's understanding of what is happening in the movie to achieve this sound directionality, then you've completely lost the plot.
- I think it makes it somewhat easier to understand than audio only, for one thing.
- If you do not know what they said, because you have missed it, possibly due to other noise in the room (telephone, other people speaking, etc).
- Sometimes the speech of the movie is difficult due to e.g. you do not understand the accent of their speech, etc.
- If you want to reduce the volume or mute to not bother other people.
- If you do not know how to spell someone's name, or an obscure word. (Unfortunately, sometimes the caption writers do not know, and do it wrong.)
- In some shows, they will mention the name of a piece of music; this can help in case you do not know. (They do not always do this, though.)
However, there are often problems with them. For example, sometimes the caption writers do not know what they are saying, either. The caption writers should try to make an effort to find out what they are saying (and the proper spelling), by whatever means are appropriate, e.g. referring to the script, asking the people there, watching the show twice to make corrections if necessary, etc. (This might not always be possible, e.g. live shows that are broadcast as they are being filmed rather than being edited later, but they should do it when possible.)
I also sometimes see worthless captions, e.g. "male announcer reads words on screen". I think that is worthless, and should be omitted.
(If you can specify "hidden captions", then it may be useful to encode the text which is already part of the picture, as a hidden caption and then allow it to be displayed in a caption scrollback menu if the TV system you are using has such a menu (I do not know of any that do have it, but it is something that I would think would be good to have).)
A good feature of captions is that you can turn on/off, and can customize fonts/opacity on some receivers (I personally prefer translucent captions). (DVD video only allows on/off (and selection by language, sometimes), although it should also be possible to allow adjusting colours/opacity (since DVD subtitles are encoded as pictures using indexed colours), although font changing will not be possible.)
Recently bought a sound bar which has helped quite a bit with the audio quality - apparently it's one with emphasis on centre channel so should have better voice output? - but we're still rocking the subtitles.
The big downside is I tend to read them much faster. So I'm often laughing at jokes several seconds before my partner as apparently I read faster than they do!
I'm using a Roku streambar with a couple of wireless speakers. Still poo audio. And I'm not convinced a system of higher cost and quality would solve it.
Also there was the diner robbery scene in "Pulp Fiction." My brother said, "Let's turn on subtitles despite the fact that this guy is speaking English. I can't deal with the accent."
Plays to some stereotypes at least.
Aha! I have some answers here. Kind of, anyway.
This is something that people older than 20-something do, too, and have done their whole lives.
They're likely to do it if they grew up with the following often being true:
1) The TV is on.
2) At least some people are actually trying to watch it (it's not just "background noise")
3) The living space is fairly compact, such that if people are making noise in common areas there are no other common areas to escape to (not with a TV, anyway).
4) Bedrooms maybe don't have a TV or they aren't equipped with the same stuff as the "good" (living room, probably) TV.
5) House chaotic, lots of people around doing various things, many of these people (adults and kids alike) talking much louder than what some of us may be used to.
6) TV often in use in this same way during large gatherings (family and friends over, holidays, whatever)
In other words—drum roll—a Fussellian "Prole" (lower class) house.
But, why is this showing up in stats now? I suspect two causes:
1) "Prole" kids growing up and getting more streaming services than their parents had, plus using them more.
2) Anime has gone very, very mainstream among "the youths", so (as some others have noted) this may be expanding the set of people for whom captions seem normal beyond the ones I'm otherwise describing here.
Source: I know people for whom having the captioning on was normal when they were growing up, and they still do it because it's what they're used to, and I was in their houses when we were kids and saw why they gained that habit/preference. They're older than their 20s.
[EDIT] Others mentioned modern video sources coming with audio mixes that suck ass on most home entertainment systems—just flat-out incompatible with the reality of how most people watch TV/movies, where they want the highs (KABOOM! BLAM, BLAM!) to be much lower than the highs in a modern movie theater, plus are very likely watching on a crappy "sound bar", if not built-in stereo speakers. That could be a 3) on my list of causes, with 2 and 3 both being things other than the main phenomenon I'm describing int he rest of the post. This one would basically be the fault of movie and TV productions themselves, who aren't serving most home viewers well with the audio mixes they're providing.
(There are ZERO excuses for all of the below. None. It's just text on a screen, displayed by dedicated apps on Smart TVs, fully equipped with CPUs and GPUs! Netflix staff especially that come across this thread: You should be ashamed. Shame. Shame. Shame.)
1. English subtitles != English subtitles for the hearing impaired. I don't want "Breathes loudly" and "Bang!" over action scenes. I live in a household where everyone's second language is English, and if I turn the subtitles on for them, the extra sound-effects subtitles drive me crazy.
2. Can't have multiple subtitles for mixed-language households. My partner prefers subtitles in her language, but then if there's a scene in an English-language movie with a short foreign-language segment in it, I have to pause, switch to English for the hearing impaired (see point #1), and then pause and switch back when the scene is over. I should be able to select any two or even three subtitle languages, such as "auto english + japanese", or whatever.
3. Can't have subtitles in some languages. Netflix in particular loves to waste $500K annual total comp on data scientists who analyse their market segments to select the "top 5" languages in each market region. Don't speak one of those languages? Tough titties, no subtitles for you! It's not even a matter of copyright or distribution rights. They do this for their own productions too! They do it because some idiot at Netflix thought too many options was "hard to navigate". You know what's even harder? Trying to understand a movie when it doesn't have subtitles matching your language!!
4. Eye-searing HDR subtitles. Netflix again. On my Sony OLED TV the subtitles use the HDR max-brightness white. They illuminate my entire room and look like someone is trying to burn the text into my retinas with high-powered flashlights. This cannot be adjusted... for some languages. For like, no reason. English: can be fixed! French: yes. Japanese, Arabic, Hebrew, Korean, Romanian, Traditional Chinese, and Thai: BURN YOUR HEATHEN EYEBALLS! See: https://help.netflix.com/en/node/100267
Also, closed captions make watching TV on mute seamless and that’s fantastic if you like to intersperse your viewing with conversation.
Decent captioning really didn't occur until the age of Blu-ray and streaming, around 15 years ago; 1080p captions that were inobtrusive and in lockstep with the dialogue at hand. The 20-somethings would have grown up with perfectly acceptable, inobtrusive captions, and thus have no issue keeping them on-screen to avoid confusion when keeping the television volume at a reasonable volume.
I'm no 20-something, and we keep Blu-ray and streaming captions on in our household. This is a new thing in the past 10-15 years, and it has to do entirely with the quality of captioning and nothing having to do with anything else.
Plus yeah they're a little lagged so helpful for multitasking if you miss a fraction of a sentence. Lets you recover from the gap without rewinding the vid
Might as well just set cc on to default
I also love watching Spanish subtitles to learn the language better. However, I do tend to disable them on YouTube, because they distract and detract from the viewing experience when they are completely unnecessary.
On the contrary, listening is difficult, especially when people don't talk very well or loud enough, or with foreign accents.
Combining reading and listening is a way to simply reduce the cognitive load.
For me it was always that I could never really make out the dialogue much of the time, and with live tv there was no rewinding so CC gave me a second chance if I missed something.
Also if we're watching something with loud ads (Hulu), we'd rather have the show be quiet and have CC on then have to constantly adjust the volume.
In theory one can use systemwide in-line effects with something like AU Lab to the same end, but that's kind of a pain at least on Mac, mostly because virtual audio devices like ‘Blackhole’ tend to not work. Perhaps the paid ‘Loopback’ does work, dunno.
Also funny how USians complain en masse about volume too loud (with the trademark ‘shaking the house’), when with a simple pair of desktop speakers it would be physically impossible to have that problem. Man buys big speakers, surprised to discover that they provide loud sound.
On the other hand, unfortunately, as many others have said - modern audio mixes almost force subtitles to be turned on, making it a 'necessary evil'.
Very few movies actually put an overlay and show such conversations using legible text. If the messages are important for the plot, it would be great if the filmmakers took care of this aspect.
This is quite bad with many streaming shows.
I still remember watching Tenet and feeling like it was just another movie I couldn’t understand because I didn’t have subtitles. And then I realized that even native speakers couldn’t understand it.
It used to be called "Language Learning with Netflix" but they rebranded it and I can't remember the new name right now. I'm not affiliated in any way, just a happy user.
2. Then I put on CC so I could watch things at 2-3x and still keep up
3. I’ve got young kids and I can’t watch shows at times with the volume up if everyone else is sleeping
4. I got it as a tip for kids shows too so children can see the words they are hearing. Helps them reinforce their vocabulary. So it’s always on if the kids are watching tv.
What’s not to like about CC?
Of course my solution is pirating content I already pay for.
UK TV back then had subtitles on teletext page 888. (And maybe it still does? I don't watch TV any more.) My flatmates and I would always switch this on when watching TV, as it meant we could talk, while still being able to keep track of what was going on in the programme.
If the audio is recorded on a potato (aka: standard Hollywood audio editing nowadays) and you can't move backward to try again, you need subtitles to not lose context.
But in the case of tiktok and netflix, it's probably because the content isn't worth your full attention...
It's because people are listening to shows through terrible audio setups by default
Is a 38 years old who watched anime since at least 20 years ago. There were people who delicates into translating new anime episodes with captions every week. The best teams have it done within 3 hours after the episode is aired in Japan.
Also, for those who think viewers are morally obligated to watch ads, my experience has been that if I don't click the "Skip Ad" button, I will keep getting more ads and never get to the feature!
Got used to it after a couple of years and found them useful for deciphering speech that would otherwise be missed.
As others have said, sometimes actors mumble stuff, dialogue is hard to hear and explosions and other side noises end up too loud.
Shame but someone thought this was a good idea…
The article suggests tiktok has such a thing.
So now I hate it double. Either can't understand dialog, or need obnoxious un-immersive subtitles turned on.
So most of the time watching I have to have make an effort to my eyes stay away from the bottom part of the screen, only to "check the cheat sheet" when they start mumbling or ruin the movie with terrible mixing.
It's not the viewer. It's the content.
It seems like most content now. Tenet is just the parody of it, ironically parodying before most of the phenomenon had bloomed.
(Some) Younger ones learned to read better thanks to subtitles in computer games.
EDIT: Come to think of it, makes DVD commentaries much more useful as well.
I don't want to ask Siri every time.
I've been doing something slightly similar in reading Fawlty Towers scripts [1] on my phone while watching the episodes, and it yielded about 20% more jokes (ones I'd missed in the past, even from 10+ viewings of each episode!).
For example, Basil mumbling this brilliancy in his initial exchange with Mr Hutchinson:
> In a nutshell
> Case, more like.
[1] https://subslikescript.com/series/Fawlty_Towers-72500/season...
If you just click on the link above, WSJ will display a paywall.
This is due to one of Google's requirements that if they index your page, it needs to be fully accessible when clicked.
Followed by a stout paywall.
If you can't hear the audio clearly the director didn't want to you to hear the audio correctly. Some scenes especially with thick accents the point is to be ambiguous, you having captions on is basically a cheat code to get more context than the director wanted you to have.
Same goes for when someone speaks a foreign language, if the CC is not baked into the video layer I assume the director wanted me to be in the shoes of someone who cant understand a conversion and guess the characters intent.
It's like reading a novel with pictures on every page, you don't need that much context, it robs your brains ability to infer with missing context.